On a seven-month deployment with the Army National Guard in 2010–11 in Afghanistan, Michelle Cifelli learned to practice medicine without relying on the specialists and second opinions to which she was accustomed in the medical jobs she held after graduating.

Photography:

R. David Beales

Michelle Cifelli was the kind of little girl who always fetched the bandages when someone had a boo-boo. Eventually, those care-giving instincts took her to the physician assistant program at Rutgers—and eventually to an outpost in eastern Afghanistan, where, as part of the American war effort, she tended to everything from minor aches to mass casualties.

In a seven-month deployment with the Army National Guard in 2010–11, Cifelli SHRP’07 learned to practice medicine without relying on the specialists and second opinions to which she was accustomed in the medical jobs she held after graduating. “You’re the pharmacist, you’re the doctor, you’re the psychologist,” says Cifelli, now a captain in the National Guard. “You wear a lot of hats when you’re working in a battalion aid station.”

When she volunteered for her Afghanistan deployment, she was naive about the horrors of war, Cifelli told faculty and students at the School of Health Related Professions during an emotional speech in Piscataway, New Jersey, last year. “You take a motherly role toward these soldiers, and to lose them is very difficult,” she says. “And I just wanted the audience to know that it’s not easy. It’s not easy what we do.”

Once home from Afghanistan, Cifelli had developed invisible scars, bottling up her sorrow and her survivor’s guilt. But the tug of service and sacrifice proved irresistible; she wanted to care for soldiers again. She spent six months working at an Army hospital in Texas before returning to New Jersey last year. Now working in a hospital emergency room and married to a fellow soldier whom she met during her deployment, Cifelli is ambivalent about leaving her toddler son behind for another deployment. But she feels drawn to military service nonetheless. “There’s still people going over, and they’re going to need someone to take care of them,” Cifelli says. “I’m willing to step into that role.”